The Daily Stoic - Self-Reliance and the Confidence in Trusting Your Inner Wisdom | Mark Matousek

Episode Date: April 20, 2024

Mark Matousek is a bestselling author, teacher, and speaker whose work focuses on personal awakening and creative excellence through transformational writing and self-inquiry. He brings over three decades of experience as a memoirist, editor, interviewer, survivor, activist, and spiritual seeker to his penetrating and thought provoking work with students. You can grab a signed copy of Lessons from an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life from The Painted Porch. If you would like an unsigned copy, click here. IG: @mark.matousek and @theseekersforumFacebook: @mark.matousek ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you want to focus more on your well-being this year, you should read more and you should give Audible a try. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks focused on wellness from physical, mental, spiritual, social, motivational, occupational, and financial. You can listen to Audible on your daily walks. You can listen to my audiobooks on your daily walks. And stillness is the key. I have a whole chapter on walking, on walking meditations, on getting outside. And it's one of the things I do when I'm walking. Audible offers a wealth of wellbeing titles to help you get closer to your best life and the best you.

Discover stories to inspire, sounds to soothe, and voices that can change your life. Wherever you are on your wellbeing journey, Audible is there for you. Explore bestsellers, new releases, and exclusive originals. Listen now on Audible. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan.

And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Alan Turing. Why are we talking about Alan Turing, Peter? Alan Turing is the father of computer science and some of those questions we're thinking about today around artificial intelligence. Turing was so involved in setting and framing what some of those questions were but he's also interesting for lots of other reasons Afro. He had such a fascinating life he was unapologetically gay at a time when that was completely criminalised and stigmatised and from his imagination he created ideas that have

formed the very physical, practical foundation for all of the technology on which our lives depend. And on top of that, he's responsible for being part of a team that saved millions, maybe even tens of millions of lives because of his work during the Second World War, using maths and computer science to code-break. So join us on Legacy wherever you get your podcasts. on Legacy, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Emily, one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. Some of them hit the big time overnight, some had

to plug away for years. But in our latest series, we're talking about a man who was world famous before he was even born. A life of extreme privilege that was mapped out from the start, but left him struggling to find his true purpose. A man who, compared to his big brother, felt a bit, you know, spare. Yes, it's Prince Harry. You might think you know everything about him, but trust me, there's even more. We follow Harry and the obsessive all-consuming relationship of his life not with Megan but the British tabloid

press. Hounded and harassed Harry is taking on an institution almost every bit as powerful as his own royal family. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wandery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wandery app. Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied

to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Sometimes people ask me, you know, who's a modern Stoic?

Did Stoicism die off with Marcus Aurelius? And it's true, there's a who's a modern stoic did stoicism die off with Marcus Aurelius and it's true There's a big gap between now and the stoics time There is that thing in between, you know, we call it the dark ages, right? We forgot about a lot of the stuff but in the Renaissance there's a resurgence of stoicism in The enlightenment there's a resurgence of Stoicism. And then in America, especially there is a huge popularity resurgence

of Stoicism, not just in the Civil War itself, which was as they call the fiery trial, but Emerson was often known as the American Stoic. Thoreau reads Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus. Emerson does too. And his ideas on self-reliance and resilience, self-education, and sort of trying to find virtue in nature and the world rather than necessarily organized religion.

These are all very stoic ideas. And the more I read Emerson, the more I see the overlap between him and stoicism. That's why I was really excited about this new book. It's called Lessons from an American Stoic, How Emerson Can Change Your Life by Mark Matusik, who was nice enough to come out to the painted porch to do an interview.

His new book is great. Funny enough, there's another book that matches the subtitle that I also love, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life by my friend Russ Roberts. Also great, carry that in the painted porch. There's a stoic connection there too. Smith is tutored by trains under a university professor

who knew the stoics. So these ideas were swirling around in these great thinkers and people. And Emerson is one of the greatest. And I've read a bunch about Emerson lately. He's a character throughout my writings, especially now in the Virtue series. Talking a lot about him in the Wisdom book.

He's in the Justice book. There's this great Emerson quote I love. He says, great is he who confers the most benefits, who helps the most people. And Emerson helped so many people, Thoreau and Hawthorne and Alcott, Whitman. Whitman writes, he writes this letter to Whitman. He says, I greet you at the beginning of a great career.

Emerson was just this awesome dude. And the more I read Emerson, the more I like him. That's why I was really excited about Mark's new book, Lessons from an American Stoic, How Emerson Can Change Your Life. Mark's a best-selling author, a teacher, and he talks a lot in this episode about how he came to Emerson from a very dark moment in his life where he thought his life was coming to an end. And I think you're really gonna like this episode. You can follow him on Instagram at mark.matusik, follow him on Facebook at mark.matusik,

and you can grab copies of lessons from an American Stoic from The Painted Porch or anywhere books are sold. I think we are running or we have run an excerpt from it. If not, I'm gonna chase that ball down because I wanted to show that. In the meantime, listen to this wonderful episode with Mark recorded here at the Painted Porch. I'll talk to you all soon.

So make the case for me that Emerson is the American Stoic. So obviously I love the title, but why is Emerson, I wouldn't exactly say modern, but why is he a reincarnation of the Stoics? Because transcendentalism and Stoicism are identical in so many ways. You know, looking at nature being the greatest teacher, looking at character being destiny.

Sure. A perspective is everything. Self-reliance. Self-reliance is a stoic path. Virtue is the, uh, portal to happiness. Yes. I mean, I could go on. He's-

Please do. Yeah. He just, uh, is, he is a modern day. I mean, he's, he's, he's the American stoic of the 19th century. And he was somebody who was all about trusting the inner voice, the what he called the whisper only you can hear and tuning into the one mind.

And so he as a stoic was really a minority person in his time. He was thought of as a stoic, was really a minority person in his time. He was thought of as a heretic. Yeah, he turns away from the church and towards sort of the ancient worlds. And yeah. And saying that you don't need the church or a temple or a priest as an intermediary

between you and the higher intelligence. You do get the sense too. I mean, he's this great reader. That's what Emerson really is. He's this sort of lifelong love affair with books. That something lights up in him when he finds certain thinkers, you know? And when he finds meditations,

it must have been an incredible experience for him because they're two men after the same thing. Exactly, exactly. And trust thyself and obey yourself. There's really no, there's really very little sunlight between those two philosophies. But he was rejected. I mean, there was a whole anti-transcendentalist movement

of people who just thought that he was a blasphemer and a heretic. And after he gave his famous Harvard Divinity School address and told those boys who were studying for the priesthood to throw out their books, forget about the church, go out in the woods by themselves, that's stoicism. It's all about self-reliance. So how did you come to Emerson?

I came to Emerson at a time in my life. I was a graduate student. I was miserable and hated academia. I felt really lost and wondered if I was ever gonna find my way. And when I started reading Emerson, it gave me a vision of the world that I had never had before.

I grew up in an atheist, purportedly Jewish household. And when Emerson said that there was a voice inside us, that there's an intelligence inside us that's larger than we are, that really resonated with me, even though I didn't believe in God, I don't believe in that kind of a God, but it gave me a vision of what was possible

in terms of human potential that really saved me at a time in my life when I needed to have a sense of what was possible in terms of human potential that really saved me at a time in my life when I needed to have a sense of what this was about, what was this life meant to be. Well, there's an energy in Emerson, a sort of a love of knowledge. And it seems weird to say like a love of the self because it sounds sort of egotistical

and like self-involved, but this idea that the self is endlessly fascinating and you're complicated and that people are complicated and that the study of one's life is figuring out one self and other people, do you know what I mean? There's just this intensity to him because he's writing to you, the audience, kind of, but he's also kind of writing to himself

as he figures stuff out. And so it's a really, if you haven't read anything, if you haven't read him before, you haven't read anything like him before. No, that's exactly true. He said, if every man would just trust what comes up in him naturally, he'd find that everyone is interesting.

Yes. You know, that you are in fact an interesting being. But he's also talking about different selves. He's not just talking about the interesting. Yes. You know, that you are in fact an interesting being. But he's also talking about different selves. He's not just talking about the personality. Yeah. He's talking about the larger self. Yeah. And the part of us that's aligned with God,

with the divinity, with the one mind, with the over soul. That's the self that fascinated him a lot more than the personality. Yeah. Even though character, of course, matters, but it's character in alignment with those higher values. What's interesting about Emerson too is like, there's not a lot of 19th century writers

that you can still read. You know what I mean? You can read the ancients because it was so long ago that they can translate it into an accessible, understandable form of English, right? But when you read a 19th, you know, someone writing in the early or the mid 1800s in English, you're stuck with their convoluted, ponderous,

you know, pretentious style of like English or old English or whatever you want to call it. It's like Shakespeare, the hard part about Shakespeare is that it's in English, so you should be able to get it. But really, he's basically talking in a foreign language. And what is interesting about Emerson is that, I mean, there's some of his stuff that's better than others, but like, you don't have to be some trained academic

to make your way through it. And it feels very modern, probably because he was such a great speaker and he would write to perform almost. So there's something very lyrical and straightforward and accessible about what he's doing. Yeah, and still the vernacular can be hard. Yes, yes.

The 19th century American can be hard, but you're right. He was teaching on the Lyceum circuit. He was speaking to audiences and he wanted to break out of the ecclesiastical kind of model. So he was really drawing, as you said, on a lot of different sources, including the ancients, as well as Montaigne, who is his favorite writer.

And so it's very practical, underneath this sort of magisterial prose, it's very practical. And what I love about Emerson, the reason I fell in love with him was that he was struggling so hard as a human being. He had so many feelings, he was completely open about how insecure,

how hopeless in love he was, he was antisocial, he was highly judgmental. He was always struggling and that's what moved me about him. He wasn't presenting himself as a fait accompli. That's right. And when you read the journals, you see how much that struggle was going on and how much of a seeker he was from a very young age.

It's funny, I was just reading his essay on Montaigne and as is true for so much of Emerson, I'm not sure he talks about him at all. Like, as I'm writing this chapter about Montaigne and the books I'm doing now, and I was like, I'll go back and reread Emerson's essay on it. And normally Emerson is so clear and he says so much. And I'm like, I'm like five pages in,

I don't even think I've seen the name yet. So I think what's also interesting is he would so often use the topic as really a jumping off point to explore an infinite amount of things. He's kind of just going where it takes him in thinking out loud and riffing on stuff. And so, Emerson is so quotable, part of the reason he's so quotable

is he produced so much stuff, and then we whittle it down to the best stuff also. But he also had a genius for aphorism. Yes. He did, he was, what aside from the philosophy, he was just such a brilliant writer. Yes. And so you just take these nuggets, these gems out of,

and they're timeless. And they don't need, as you're saying, they don't need a translation. Yeah. You know, when you say, you know, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Everybody gets that. Yes.

And people, when he talks about nonconformity, everybody gets that and originality. Yeah, I mean, I do love that quote. My favorite one from him is where he talks about how, when you have an idea and then you don't act on it, and then you see someone else take advantage of it. And he says, it comes back to you with a kind of alienated majesty.

Yeah. It's so, he's so perfect in the way that a comedian nails something that we all do, but we don't talk about. Yeah. He said, yeah, you have this idea and then you go, oh, that's stupid or oh, that's weird or oh, I'm too shy or whatever. And then you're reading it and someone else talks about it

or you see it and I could have done that. I could have taught, you know, and that, so the idea that someone 150 plus years ago was thinking the same thing is also so cool. Yeah, yeah, he said, you know, trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. You know, it's that iron string that runs not only through us individually, but through us culturally

and as a species. So if you're not responding through us individually, but through us culturally and as a species. So if you're not responding or articulating, expressing when that iron string gives you something, someone else is gonna do it. My other favorite one from Emerson is he has this essay on travel. And although he's someone who travels all the time, he's basically saying, don't travel.

He's like, so many of us bring ruins to ruins. Because we travel as an escape. We don't like where we are, we don't like what's happening. And we think, oh, of us bring ruins to ruins, right? Because we travel as an escape. We don't like where we are. We don't like what's happening. And we think, oh, I'm gonna go to Europe. I'm gonna go to India. I'm gonna backpack. I'm gonna do this.

It'll be good in Hawaii. And it won't be because you're there, you know? And the thing I love that he points out in that essay that I think about all the time, he goes, the people who built the things that you are going to visit, the things that are so impressive and amazing. He's like, they didn't do that by traveling.

They did it by staying where they are doing the work. And again, so in the 1800s, you don't think about people as having the ability to just pack up and leave and travel, but no, they did. And that same sort of wanderlust and escapism that's easier now when you can fly across the world for a cheap airline ticket. It's also there for him and has been for people

for all time. Yeah. But he always warned against the exterior life as opposed to the interior life and getting too- What's the difference? Well, the interior life is the timeless self, the part of us that's outside of circumstances, outside of conditions.

The exterior life is samsara, it's everything that's happening around us, the changing circumstances. And that when we identify too much with those things, whether it's going to Rome or whether it's, you know, some emotional, you know, experience we're having, then we're losing touch with the part of us that's awake. Yeah.

And that is deeper than that. And that doesn't depend on changing conditions for our wellbeing. That's really the essence. And that to me is stoicism. Of course. It's pure stoicism. So what was your introduction to Emerson? Where did you start?

I started at UCLA. I was in a PhD program. I was saying I was miserable. I hated academia. I knew I wanted to get out. And my last year there, I happened to fall into a job as a research assistant for a very renowned Emerson scholar named Barbara Packer.

And I didn't know much about him at all. I had read a couple of essays in high school, which I couldn't penetrate really. And so I spent a year in the library stacks, digging up references and reading his journals. And I got a really good introduction to Emerson because I needed to make money. I was broke and I needed a job.

Sure, they forced you to go down a rabbit hole. It forced me into a rabbit hole, exactly. And I turned around at the end of that year and realized that I had fallen in love with this guy, not only philosophically, but as I said, personally, I had a deep identification with him. There were things I could really relate to in his life. I was a fatherless kid.

I was an insecure kid. I was an antisocial kid. There were many things that resonated for me. And so it endeared him to me. And what blew my mind was that out of this insecure work in progress came this extraordinary wisdom. And that's what blew me away was that even for a wreck, even for somebody a mess like me,

that there could be a possibility of articulating those kinds of truths or at least knowing those kinds of things. And so as a human being, he spoke to me very deeply. And as I said, the transcendental philosophy and the non-dual philosophy blew my mind. It's a tradition, right? Because you're reading Emerson, but really when you're,

and I think he says this somewhere, but that we're all sort of compilations or composites of all the influence. So you're reading Emerson, and when you're reading Emerson, you're reading all the things that Emerson read. And he's reading all the people that they've ever read. So it's this chain going back thousands of years of all of these books funneling down into this singular book

or this singular essay or this singular quote, right? And so really the world of Emerson is this world of all these other people, right? One of my, I mentioned that Montanio essay, he has this book, Representative Men, where he just picks like seven or eight people and it's their biography, but it's really what their influences were,

what made them different, what tradition they were a part of. And that's, I think, the really cool part of Emerson. Yeah, there's a wonderful book about him, Robert Richardson's book, Mind on Fire, and it's all about his intellectual formation. It's like, it doesn't matter where he was born, it doesn't matter what his parents were like.

It was like, what was the, what's, yeah, what are the influences of Emerson? Right, what was he reading? Yes. The paradox here is that he always warns against worshiping the past and heroes of the past and thinking that because it was said 2000 years ago, it's therefore superior in some way.

So, and that's another thing I think the Stoics said is not being deceived by the antiquity of things to thinking that they're necessarily superior. So while he owed a lot to his predecessors and the people he learned from, he warns against worshiping them simply because they came before us and devaluing ourselves. Yes, well, it's very empowering, right?

I think he says, he's like, you got to remember Socrates and Plato and all these, he was like, they were young men when they had these ideas. That they weren't the these sort of oracles or larger than life figures and that they weren't walking around in their togas or their robes. They were just ordinary people figuring things out.

And that even like what they wrote down was in some cases like the least interesting part of them. It was how they lived and what they experienced. And yeah, he's, towards the end, he's basically going like, well, what do you say? That's the tradition, right? It's not just the tradition of the celebrating all these brilliant things from the past,

but ultimately Emerson is saying, you gotta do what I'm doing, which is like also write your own stuff, have your own ideas, put your own spin on it. And that's what's so cool about what he does. Yeah, and he's also always about practical philosophy. That's why he loved journaling so much as obviously the Stoics did as well.

And realizing that your own life is a laboratory and that you have the, you know, your life is an experiment and that you have to, the more experiments you make, the more, the more you learn, the more wisdom you receive. And the more you are not influenced, unduly influenced by powers outside of you. You know, he warns so much, he says society is not your friend.

You know, and to be yourself in the crowd is the greatest accomplishment. So it's really about self-reliance and that deep sense of trusting your own knowing. Do you, so I think most of us interact with Emerson probably in the handful of essays that are popular. Maybe we read a book like, Mind on Fire, but what do you find in the journals in the,

he's famously keeps the commonplace book of the quotes that he likes and the notes that he's doing. He's not just reading and then reciting, there's this kind of intermediary step of digesting and riffing and questioning. What do you see in all that from him? You see the angst and you see the fear and you see the loneliness.

He was profoundly lonely. Why? Because he had this difficulty connecting with other people. He said, I have a porcupine impossibility of contact. So even, he said, even sitting in my own house, there's a gap between me and everyone around me. So you really, you feel this deep alienation.

It's a seeker's alienation. It's a philosopher's alienation. Because it's the outsider's perspective on this human predicament, this human condition and how we can live it. And in the journals, you see how he was doing that on a daily basis, the mistakes that he made, the regrets that he had, the rages,

the irrational, impulsive kinds of fallings out he had with people. That's what you see in the journal. It takes you apart, right? Like, have you seen the Barbie movie? Yeah. You know, they're all dancing, they're at the party at the house,

and then she goes, hey, do you guys ever think about death? You know, it's like a record scratch. It's like, no, we don't think about that at all. And I think there is something in the philosopher's path in the decision to seek knowledge and to explore oneself, where you start asking questions and thinking about things that you realize are not only not occurring to other people,

but they resent you or look askance at you for bringing up, right? And so, yeah, it's not that philosophers have to be lonely, but there is something that separates you, at least at first, that takes you away because suddenly you're not like everyone else and you're not on the same wavelength as everyone else. Absolutely, that's the left-handed path.

It's the path of self-discovery. And that's why often it's crisis or catastrophe or disaster that leads people onto a seekers path. Until you have your comfortable version of things shaken up until you have that story deconstructed by life, who wants to take that left-handed path? Who wants to walk around thinking about mortality all the time?

But once you realize the situation we're in, you see that there's really nothing else to think about if you wanna prepare yourself for the realities of your life. Yeah, I mean, he's on this path. He goes to Divinity School, he's on this path to be a minister, he has a church, and then he starts thinking about things

and reading things and experiences things. And he realizes like, I can't get up here every Sunday and talk about these things that I don't believe. He basically goes, I can't tell you guys what you want to hear. That wouldn't be true to who I am. And so the asking of the questions are, you know, starting to pull on the thread. You could argue it really, it unravels his whole life.

You know, it deprives him of the security, the status, the safety that he had went to school for, that his family had picked out for him, that all his friends and colleagues were in. And it does it, ultimately it's for the best. It sets him on this whole path. This is also the founding of stoicism, right? Zeno suffers his shipwreck and he loses everything.

And he says, you know, I made a great fortune when I suffered a shipwreck. But he only thinks that years later, right? The interim period would have been lonely and scary and destabilizing because all your old creature comforts are gone. Yeah, I mean, the reason that happened to Emerson is that he lost his wife.

Yeah. You know, his 19 year old wife died of TB a year after they were married. It completely broke his heart. He lost his traditional faith and he realized he couldn't deliver the sacraments. He couldn't be a minister in good faith. So it wasn't a conscious choice.

Life did it. Life stripped him down. And he had also been prepared for that. His dad died when he was nine years old. He grew up in poverty. He was the kid, the Emerson kid that nobody expected much of. He graduated number 39 in the class of 60 from Harvard.

He wasn't that outstanding. So he came from a lot of insecurity to begin with. And then when his wife Ellen died, that was the catalyzing event that got him to go to Europe, to really start and commit himself to writing, to leave the church, and to take on this transcendental philosophy

that doesn't depend on an institution to connect you to spiritual experience. I do think that is something that we can take from Emerson, right? When we have these encounters with truth, we have these rude awakenings, everything is laid bare. It's not a foregone conclusion that we see that or we make that change, right?

What a lot of people do is they wait for it to subside, they find a way to pretend, they find a way to unsee. You know, there's another path where Emerson squashes the doubts, chooses not to understand the thing that his salary depends on him not understanding, and he just goes back to work. And he's an ordinary, maybe even extraordinary minister, but he's not Emerson, the American stoic,

the transcendentalist, the philosopher, the sort of guy that influences so many artistic lives, as well as we're still reading and talking about him today. It's cause he doesn't turn away from that painful, destabilizing truth that he faces. Exactly, and that's the fact, that's the case for all of us. How do we respond to crisis?

How do you respond when truth slams you in the face? Do you turn away? Do you try to rationalize? Do you hide? Do you hide out in addiction or whatever? Or do you face what it is and let it take you deeper? And that's what he did. He didn't have any choice in the matter though.

Temperamentally, he wasn't able to turn away and just go into a conventional kind of life. It wasn't who he was. He had a profound belief in nonconformity and the importance of not moving with the crowd and listening to the whisper only you can hear. That was something that he needed for his own survival. He couldn't have done that the other, he couldn't have done that other path. Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island? Well that's exactly what Jane, Phil and their three kids did when they traded their English home for a tropical island they bought online.

when they traded their English home for a tropical island they bought online. But paradise has its secrets, and family life is about to take a terrifying turn. You don't fire at people in that area without some kind of consequence. And he says, yes, ma'am, he's dead. There's pure cold-blooded terror running through me. Yes, ma'am. He's dead. There's pure cold-blooded terror running through me. From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine, and this is The Price of Paradise. The real-life story of an island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption and murder. Search and follow The Price of Paradise now to listen to the full trailer.

Price of Paradise now to listen to the full trailer. I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. And we're the presenters of British Scandal. And in our latest series, Hitler's Angel, we tell the story of scandalous beauty, Diana Mosley, British aristocrat, Mitford sister, and fascist sympathizer. Like so many great British stories, it starts at a lavish garden party. Diana meets the dashing fascist Oswald Mosley.

She's captivated by his politics but also by his very good looks. It's not a classic rom-com story, but when she falls in love with Mosley, she's on a collision course with her family, her friends and her whole country. There is some romance though. The couple tied the knot in a ceremony organised by a great, uncelebrated wedding planner, Adolf Hitler. So it's less Notting Hill, more Nuremberg. When Britain took on the Nazis, Diana had to choose between love or betrayal. This is the story of Diana Mosley on her journey from glamorous socialite to political prisoner.

Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I was surprised at the way that his aunt was such an influence in that regard. He has this sort of nonconformist, interesting aunt who he basically says is like the smartest person I ever met. But she seemed like the biggest intellectual influence on him, maybe even more than the Stoics or some of these classical figures. Well, she was to begin with, she was his first great teacher.

Mary Moody Emerson, she was this fiery Calvinist. She used to travel in a burial shroud in case she died on the road so she could go faster. She slept in a coffin shaped bed and she was very, very eccentric, but she was all about being yourself, being an individual and pushing against the tide, the convention. She pushed in a much more conservative,

fundamentalist direction. That's why when Emerson took up Transcendentalism, she thought he had become a pagan and she felt like Satan had taken him over. But the fact is that she taught him to stand on his own and to dare to be different. And so that she really was his first great teacher in how to approach the world with some skepticism.

Yeah. And she wrote like these hundreds and hundreds of letters which he edited and published, right? That was a thing that he wasn't just engaging with once. And I think that's an interesting part of his reading habits that, you know, he didn't just read a bunch of stuff one time, but he was always kind of dipping back in and back out.

And he was reading and rereading. And I think he translates or publishes, he edits and publishes all her letters. So he's engaging with these ideas multiple times. And he kind of has this fluency in them that seems like it was a big part of shaping him intellectually. Yeah, as I mean, he was an introvert.

He was a profound introvert. So he was happiest in his study with his books. And like you said, he was somebody who revisited these ideas again and again, and reread the people he loved again and again. He didn't agree with a lot of what Mary Moody Emerson said. But she has a role model for difference in eccentricity and originality, she was the one.

But then also this idea of correspondence, he's writing letters to and from her, and he has these correspondence in Europe. He's a great letter writer, and he has this kind of international intellectual network that he's a part of, that's I think much closer to what we have today, where you can tweet or message or email or watch, you know what I mean?

He wasn't this provincial American dude, he was a globalist, you know? Absolutely, yeah, no, he and Carlisle had a lifelong, Nietzsche was a great lover of Emerson. He had great friends around the world and he was, like you said, a great letter writer. He wasn't a nationalist. He was absolutely an internationalist.

And he could see nationalism creeping up in America of his time and he warned against it. And the values that he saw taking over, he said it's the vulgarity of this country to believe that material wealth without wisdom leads to happiness. And so he was much more European. Well, I think also because he so loved these figures

of the past, he kind of saw himself as being like out of space and time. So that allows him to relate to these German thinkers and these English thinkers. And then also, to not see race or color the way that pretty much everyone at that time did also, or class. He was able to take in new people and ideas

for what they were as opposed to his preconceived notions of them. He was also able to evolve because when you read the journals and you read how he described people of color in the beginning versus how it evolved through the war and through emancipation, he was not the same guy. He understood black people in a way

at the end of his life that he didn't at the beginning. And you can read some of the early stuff and you think, gosh, if people just read that, he'd be canceled in a minute. Even stuff he says about women, it seems so reprobate, but he was a man of his time. And that's another thing I love about him is he was fallible, he was growing.

We all have reprobate ideas. We all have things that we carry from the past that don't belong to us really, that we have to outgrow. And when you read the journals, you see how he was outgrowing and arguing with some of these ideas. He had a lot of courage that way. Yeah, he's open to new influences and new people.

So yeah, some of his ideas early on are a result of him not having met those people. He's just regurgitating what he got from someone. And then he meets Whitman or someone and he goes, okay, this is like, maybe he doesn't know, but he's like, oh, this guy's on a different wave, like vibrating a little bit differently

than the rest of basically Victoria and Boston. And he likes them and he incorporates it. So it's this kind of opening up, which so often, even with smart people, the opposite happens, right? We get more certain as we age, we get more closed-minded, more closed off, more in our own space or bubble.

And yeah, you get the sense that even up until the end, Emerson's going the other direction. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But even with Whitman, he did sense that this was somebody coming from a different place, but he told Whitman to take out the sex parts. Yeah, he's like, I don't like this vulgar stuff.

Yeah, or Whitman came to him and said, how can I make this Leaves of Grass a best seller? He said, well, take out the Songs of Adam part, take out the homoerotic parts. And he learned, he learned. But he wasn't man of his time. He was a Boston Brahmin. And he was temperamentally, unlike Thoreau,

he was a very buttoned up person. He wished that he were more free, but he wasn't. The way he lived his life, he was thoroughly bourgeois. What I so love about Emerson and Whitman is the note that Emerson sends him when he reads Leaves of the Grass for the poems for the first time. I greet you at the beginning of a grand career. And the idea to me, what was so underrated about Emerson

is his generosity. Not just he's financially supporting Thoreau and all these other people, but when he found something he liked, he celebrated it. He wasn't territorial, he wasn't egotistical, it wasn't about only himself, but when he found great work, he supported it and encouraged it,

and we might not get Whitman if it's not for Emerson's sort of blurb on the cover, right? And so Emerson was this great supporter of other people. You know, in sports they talk about like a coaching tree. Do you know what that is? It's like, so it's obviously a coach is judged on how much they win or lose, but we're also fascinated in sports with like

what their players and what their assistant coaches go on to do. So like, hey, this person was an assistant for this coach and now they're a head coach and now they're playing, like the way that coaches mentor and nurse the next generation of talent is ultimately reflects on that coach. And Emerson has an incredible coaching tree,

not just through his work, but literally, Melville and Hawthorne and Whitman and Alcott, all these great writers descend from not just Emerson intellectually, but like physically, he gave them a place to live, he published them, he encouraged them. And I think that generosity of spirit and that openness was one of his defining bits of greatness.

And Thoreau, of course. Yes, of course. Yeah. I mean, Thoreau's philosophy was Emerson's philosophy. And you're right, he had great generosity of spirit. And to me, that says something about how much he had evolved as a human being. He wasn't a petty person.

He could be judgmental, but he recognized greatness. He had a great love of beauty. He wasn't threatened by other people's greatness. No, he wasn't. He wasn't. He could be competitive. Yes. He was competitive with Thoreau.

Yeah, he was competitive with Thoreau. Sure. He said, I wish I had what he had. Yeah. That Thoreau gives me my values more directly and authentically than I myself do. You know, he can live them in a way that I can't. So he was very honest about that

and he could be harsh on himself. Yeah. He was very judgment, very self recriminating. Yes, but so many intellectuals and academics, they take that and they project it outwards and they attack other people or try to tear other people down. It's like that famous quote in academia,

the knives are so sharp because the pie is so small. Like his vision of intellectual life is the opposite of that. He's like, come live with me. You're great, I love this. Can I publish this? Have you, he's recommending other people's stuff to other people. And I mean, yeah, literally supporting.

I mean, he owns the land where, where Thoreau's cabin is built. And, and, and yet we don't get Thoreau without Emerson's generosity and patience and support. I mean, and it kind of seemed like Thoreau had eyes on Emerson's wife from time, you know, he's like so not threatened that he encourages and supports this guy like to an incredible amount. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

He had, Thoreau had kind of a platonic love affair with his wife. And he lived with them. Yeah, sure, he lived with them. He was the tutor to their kids. No, and that comes from the abundance we're talking about. This is what turned me on to him to begin with. He has an abundant sense of the world

and the majesty of the world and the great potential of the world. He's not coming from a scarcity mentality where there's a tiny little pie. He sees the world as his banquet, as this great realm of possibility. And what he wants to do is share that. And what he wants also to do is to tune people

into their own way of hooking in to that abundance. Seeing so many of us living, and so many of the people he saw around him, living with a very impoverished sense of what was possible. Well, there's a very stoic idea. Epictetus says we have to imagine life is a banquet and you're sitting at this table and there's all this stuff and he's like, you don't just grab this

and take it all for yourself. You're passing it around. You're taking a little bit of this and oh, I love this. You recommend, and it's this energy, this seeing this coming together, this breaking of bread and sharing and enjoying. And also that if you take too much, you won't feel good after.

If you drink too much, you won't feel good after. This kind of, it's abundance, but it's also moderation and mixed in there at the same time. And I think that's right. That is how Emerson seemed to see the world, that there was plenty to go around, that he didn't have to fight for what was his, and that sort of the more you give, the more you get,

which is such a better way to live, quite frankly. Well, it's a more highly evolved way. Sure. Certainly. No, he was all about interconnection and understanding that without the one being stable and open and generous, the many will suffer. Yeah.

And that's another stoic idea, recognizing that you have that, that we're like a cell in a body. And so the cells aren't, unless you're having, unless you're ill, you know, cells aren't at war with one another. There's a cooperative effect. He saw everything through a natural lens. And that's where he got some of his deepest insights was from observing nature and seeing the internist,

seeing quality of the natural world and that that's how we live as human beings. We're part of that. He said, we need to go into nature to remind ourselves that we are nature. Yeah. Well, this going into nature is so important too, because I think at our modern conception

of the philosopher or the thinker, or even the introvert would see them inside, see them pouring over their books, loving books more than people and places and things. And there's part of that, I mean, that is the intellectual life of the interior world, as you said, but yeah, he's also getting outside always. He's a farmer, he loves his fruit trees, he loves walks.

You know, he's an experienced outdoorsman, Thoreau being a further example of this, you know, Thoreau builds that cabin by hand and he can live off the land and he can hunt and trap. And his other book is about this like canoe trip that he takes. And so it wasn't just like observing nature, like in the way that you might go for a short hike

and look outside. There was this comfort in nature. This mastery is the wrong word because it implies that you're in charge. But there is this self-sufficiency, the self-reliance where like they can cut it outside. It's the strong mind and the strong body. They love nature and they are active in that nature.

And that informs and shapes their philosophical studies. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, he talks about nature as an intelligence. And it's an intelligence that we participate in. And that when we forget, when we get too caught up in society and social rules and conformity and trying to keep up with the Joneses,

we forget that organic connection to the larger natural world. And so he would go out into the woods just to get away from people. Because people were where his problems, people were the most challenging thing for him. That's where he felt the least comfortable. And Thoreau was his tutor in the natural world.

In the same way that Emerson tutored Thoreau philosophically, Thoreau knew the names of animals. He knew the names of the flora and the fauna. He knew when the eggs would be laid, what that was. And so rocking through the woods with Thoreau knew the names of animals. He knew the names of the floor and the fauna. He knew when the eggs would be laid, what that was. And so, walking through the woods with Thoreau was one of his great joys. And he was the only one he liked to walk in the woods with. Well, one of the things that I took from Emerson too

and Thoreau is like, we tend to imagine when they lived as some sort of golden age, right? Just as they looked at the past as some golden age. But I think it was in that book you mentioned, the Emerson Mountain Fire one, where the guy points out, there's more trees around Walden Pond now than there were then, because the forest had recently been clear cut, right?

Like, so they, or, you know, Thoreau builds his cabin and he's complaining about the train creeping in. We think of trains as this outdated technology. He would have thought that as like the equivalent of getting cell phone service or something, right? Like they felt like the modern world technology, people, noise was encroaching on the natural life then. And it was, it literally was.

They would look out and all they'd see are the stumps, you know? And so that same thing that we have now, a world of screens, a world of noise, a world of always being on, they were feeling that encroachment in their own way at the same time. And that's why their works feel so relevant to us.

It wasn't as quiet and peaceful and serene and natural to them as we think it was. No, no, not at all. I just think what would Emerson think of Instagram? What would Emerson think of this obsession with the exterior life, this obsession with what other people think? Influencers.

Can you imagine what Emerson would have thought of social influencers? You mean you're really going to let somebody you've never met, you know, tell you what you should wear or how you should live. It would seem absurd to him. But not that different than the newspapers or the mags. Do you know what I mean?

Like it's exploiting a very timeless human weakness. So that's why when he talks about those things, we're like, well, you're talking about this right now. I mean, one of my favorite things in Self-Reliance is he's talking about, you know, like these recent college graduates and how they're trying to figure out their way in the world. And he's like, the best ones, you know,

they try this and they fail, and they try this and they fail, and they try this and they fail, and they bounce back, unlike these other people who just expect everything to be handed to them, or they expect everything to be easy. And so, yeah, you read that at 21 years old and you leave college and you're like, oh wait, he's talking about me

because that is the timeless sort of young person entering the world's dilemma slash problem. You know, he gets at the core of these sort of coming of age developments or crossroads that we face in life, I feel like. He talked about how the rural boys would have that get up and go and they pick themselves up as opposed to the city dolls, you know, who just want to, you know, given to them on a platter and they want to find their knee in one little niche and stay there. And that was not the, he

had a, we idealized the rural life and the rural personality, which was ironic because he was so urbane. I mean, for somebody who lived in a small town, he was so, such an intellectual. He has this great thing I think about as a parent, he's talking about how your kids have to have kind of this, this buoyancy, this sort of ability to bounce back because they're gonna fail, they're gonna screw up. And, and, and Emerson had children. So he knew this fromancy, this sort of ability to bounce back because they're gonna fail, they're gonna screw up.

And Emerson had children, so he knew this from experience, but he's like, how buoyant are they? How quickly can they bounce back? Do they have that self-reliance? And he's like, if they don't, it doesn't matter. Like they're lost. But conversely, if they do have that self-reliance, that resiliency, it also doesn't matter

because they're gonna be fine. You know, he's saying, Everson's saying our job as parents is to teach our kids that, to model it and to teach our kids that, the ability to be independent, self-reliant, to learn, to grow, to be made better for the adversity they experience in life, because that's like the one thing we know that's certain in life.

And that's why he idolized childhood and the sort of the divine child and the qualities of childhood, of curiosity and not being intimidated, being willing to fall down and get up again. These are child qualities that we unlearn. When he talks about genius, he's talking about those child qualities. And Buckminster Fuller said, everybody's born a genius, but the process of living degeniuses

them. And that's what he wants not to happen for us. We don't want to be degenious by bad education, by the need to conform, by fear of our own qualities. Because of course we fear our power. by the need to conform, by fear of our own qualities, because of course we fear our power. We fear our own aptitudes and our own possibilities. It's easier to hide in a smaller container and a smaller story.

And Emerson wants us to not do that. He wants us to really, to expand. Hello, I'm Hannah. And I'm Saruti. to expand. of the Murdoch saga. Last year, we also started a second weekly show, Shorthand, which is just an excuse for us to talk about anything we find interesting, because it's our show and we can do what we like. We've covered the death of Princess Diana, an unholy Quran written in Saddam Hussein's blood, the gruesome history of European witch hunting,

and the very uncomfortable phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behavior. Like, can someone give consent to be cannibalized? What drives a child to kill? And what's the psychology of a terrorist? Listen to Red Handed wherever you get your podcasts

and access our bonus short-hand episodes exclusively on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondry Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Guy Raz's How I Built This is a podcast where each week he talks to the founders behind the world's biggest companies to learn the real stories of how they built them. In each episode, you hear these entrepreneurs really go into their story. Guy is an incredible interviewer. He doesn't just dance around the surface.

He has real questions because he himself is an entrepreneur. He's built this huge show and this huge company. In a recent episode, they talked to the founder of Liquid Death, that crazy water company that's become this billion dollar brand. Follow the show on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to How I Built This Early

and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. And for a deep dive in daily business content, listen to Wondery the destination for business podcasts with shows like How I Built This, Business Wars, The Best One Yet, Business Movers and many more. Wondery means business. How important is the scene for Emerson? I've heard someone use this phrase like a senior, like someone who's a genius because of the scene that they're in. He for Emerson. I've heard someone use this phrase like a scenius,

like someone who's a genius because of the scene that they're in. He has this, he creates this scene in Concord, right? Of Thoreau, and Novel, and Hoffman, they all live with them, they talk to each other. It's, he's not alone, you know? How important is sort of cultivating something like that? Not that important for him.

I mean, when he used genius, the way the Romans use genius as a tutelary deity, as a kind of a muse that we're born with whose purpose is to guide us toward our own fruition. It's not an exterior, it's not an external thing. So while of course we learned from other people, his recurring theme is to go within. But don't you think both he and Thoreau benefit

from being together and that neither of them would have been what they were without each other and that back and forth? Yeah, I do. Of course there's coming, he valued conversation. He was a, he loved conversation more than, and I think he loved conversation more than sex. And he thought that that was really the deepest,

most powerful way to connect. And so, yes, of course, he learned from the people that he was around, but a lot of those people were against him. Hawthorne and Melville started the Anti-Transcendentalist Club because of his dangerous philosophy, his dangerous optimism. So it's not just people who are supporting you,

it's being in opposition to, and that can help. Yeah, I think that's part of a scene, right? You know, if everyone thinks the same as you and tells you how great you are, you don't have a scene, you got a cult, right? He didn't do that, right? Like you could argue some of these people were taking advantage of him.

They were a drain on his finances. Yeah, Thoreau wasn't always the truest or the nicest friend. So yeah, I think that's an interesting point. As I'm defining Emerson's scene, it's there's competition there, there's disagreement there, there's different styles, different approaches. I guess, you know, we think of Thoreau as like moving away

into the cabin in the woods, right? And that's what like maybe what some of us, especially the more introverted of us fantasize as like the ideal intellectual environment. I gotta get away from all these noises, all these people just gotta be by myself. But I think the best work comes with peers and competition and discussion and influences and all of that.

Yeah, absolutely. But of course, Thoreau, Walden was, his little cabin was a mile off the road. His mom used to come and pick up his laundry and bring his food. So that's this great mythology that's gathered around Henry David Thoreau that a lot of it is not quite accurate.

I don't know if you read, there was a New Yorker profile a few years ago called pond scum and it was about Thoreau as a not very nice person who had built, who's a kind of mythologize or mythomane in his own right. Emerson wasn't that. Yeah. Emerson really wasn't a mythomaniac. He was less interesting than people wanted him to be when it came to his personal life.

And he didn't set himself up in that way. And the last thing he wanted was a cult to form around him. Yeah, no, that's right. And I would also argue, you know, his scene like Carlisle's appear, even though they're thousands of miles away, but he goes and he visits them. They spend time together. He goes and he visits them, they spend time together.

He goes and, you know, he's not disengaged. You know, he's engaged. And I think that's a part of it. I think it's very hard to be great as a solitary genius. You know, that we need that give and take, that participation, even if it's more comfortable to be by ourselves. Wherever he found inspiration, he drank deep.

And he was very susceptible to beauty, susceptible into inspiration, susceptible to genius in other people. That was the receptivity that was part of him being a spiritual being. He valued that kind of porousness to the world. And we want to allow things to come in, but then we don't necessarily follow them.

And we then curate what works for us and what doesn't work for us. But he was, so he was very receptive, but also skeptical about taking on too much of other people's ideas. You came to Emerson in a very dark moment in your life. What basically when you thought your life was, the sand was coming out of that hourglass

that you didn't have much time. So talk to me about the relationship between Emerson and death or Emerson and mortality. Cause that's a theme in his writings and certainly tragically is also a theme in his life. Well, it was everything. I discovered him in grad school, like I was saying, within a couple of years later,

I was diagnosed with a bad disease. I wasn't supposed to survive for five years. And that's when I really connected to his teachings on impermanence and death and reaching beyond the exterior life to something that's more lasting and understanding the value of suffering, understanding the value of hardship, that was huge.

Emerson is always saying that, he who has not been introduced to the house of pain has not seen the world. So understanding that adversity has a purpose. It's not just useless suffering. I grew up in an atheist household, a godless household where it was just as if suffering was this cross to bear, but there was nothing redemptive about it.

And Emerson showed me that there's redemption to adversity. And then in fact, it's in those moments when we meet the road, when the rubber hits the road, and when we meet our own ending or the prospect of our ending that we actually can thrive. And that's when breakthroughs happen. That's when we let go of things that are inessential. So for me, it was a great, it was a great teaching to use it.

It probably rooted you in the present, right? It roots you in the present and it gets rid of self-pity and it also connects you to this organic connection between destruction and creation, between decay, between impermanence and what you could call for lack of a better word, the eternal.

But you have to have the immediate taken away before you turn to most of us, before you turn to that in the direction of the left-handed path or spirituality and see the value of loss. He talks about loss being a great boon in a person's life. Well, his life is defined by loss. I mean, he buries his wife, the love of his life. He buries his son Waldo, basically his namesake.

He buries Thoreau. One of their dear friends dies in this horrendous shipwreck with her baby. Margaret Fuller. Yeah, and then almost all of his brothers die in like increasingly gruesome, sort of tragic, like way too short kind of a thing. So yeah, he's constantly burying these people he loves.

And there's that scene where he doesn't he re, he opens his wife's casket and he looks at it. He even burying this person that he loved He opens his wife's casket and he looks at it. He even bearing this person that he loved what almost wasn't visceral or real enough for him. He turned away from it and he said, I have to actually know I'm gonna do the opposite. Like I'm gonna stare this in the face.

And it seems like he carried that sort of sense of life's ephemerality, even brutality with him. And we're not even getting into the fact that he lived through the Civil War, which would have been horrendous and heinous. Right. After Ellen died, he fell into this deep depression and he was just paralyzed.

You couldn't find any reason for going on. And he realized that he had to shock himself out of it somehow. So he went to the cemetery and he opened her tomb. And he doesn't say much about it in the journals. But after that, everything changed in his life. He gave up the ministry, he went to Europe, he started his life as a writer in a serious way

because he had to look death in the face, literally. And so that led to what he called the law of compensation, which is that for every loss, there's a gain. For every beauty, there's an ugliness. For everything you're happy about in yourself, there's a downside. The Buddhists talk about the near enemy of any virtue, that over generosity taken too far turns into,

you know, you become a doormat. And so this idea of the other side of so-called misfortune runs all the way through his writing. And for me, it was, as I said, it was a way of kind of writing this, balancing my tendency to depression, my tendency to self-pity out with an awareness that there was value and that it's part of the awakening process to keep losing

and to, you know, the heart, as Stanley Kunis says, the heart breaks and lives by breaking. You know, we break, the heart breaks over and over. That's how we stay alive as spiritual beings. What do you think he saw? What do you think Emerson saw opening his wife's casket and staring death literally in the face? What do you think that changed in him?

It's the same reason that Buddhist monks are taught to meditate in maternal grounds, to meditate on skulls and skeletons. Without the physical fact of death, the mind will escape any way that it can. And his mind, he was in that, he was in a kind of a limbo place in his depression. He needed to shake himself into the present moment by actually seeing the decay with his own eyes.

And he wasn't able to let go of her. She was an idea that death can stay a concept until you actually see somebody dying or watch a corpse decompose. That's a profound experience. I have on my, like a little shelf in front of my mirror in the bathroom that I look at every morning, it's a hunk of a tombstone and it just says the word dad on it.

And I think about, I have no idea who this person was. I didn't like steal it or anything. It was like an artifact that I purchased. But I think about it as like, who was this person? They lived, being a parent was something that was fundamental to their identity. And then they're gone, that kid is gone. It was almost certainly too soon.

It was almost certainly not how they wanted it to go. May well have been painful. And yeah, there is something about that memento mori, that meditating, I have a little memento mori ring on actually, that meditating on the reality of existence, which is that it does end and it almost certainly will end not when you expect and sooner than you would expect. Right. It's kind of the ultimate philosophical practice.

It absolutely is. Death is the great awakening. Yeah. Every spiritual tradition says that. Yeah. Until we face non-being, we can't enter into being completely. And that's why it's so important to be aware of the fragility of things and

the ephemerality of things. It's not a morbid exercise. It brings you more into your life and gives you gratitude. If you felt like you were going on and on forever, that mortality, you were immortal, it makes you arrogant and you're not paying attention and you're not really appreciating the world. So it's actually the doorway to a much more enlightening life. Well, so the doctor tells you, you got five years, then obviously you've got many more than that. How has that changed your relationship with time?

Do you have this sense that it's borrowed time, you're playing with house money, is that what it changes for you? your relationship with time? Do you have this sense that it's borrowed time, you're playing with house money, is that what it changes for you? Or does the urgency of that fade as time goes by? Not for me. I mean, because I went through 10 years of expecting to die. And that's when I took my spiritual seeking very seriously,

went to India, I started meditating, I started taking it very seriously. And so as a friend of mine says, it's all gravy after that. It's all gravy. But you don't forget what it feels like when you're at the edge. And in fact, that was one of the things that worried me when I wasn't going to, when the treatments arrived,

and I suddenly wasn't going to, I didn't wanna lose what I had learned in extremis. Yeah. Those were, they were the scariest, but also the most interesting and growthful years of my life. And I didn't want to lose that. I didn't want to get sucked in back into

a kind of superficial, you know, life of not looking at what really matters. And that's what I did. I changed my career. I used to be in pop culture journalism. I changed to psychology, philosophy, spirituality. It changed my work. It changed the way I live.

And, you know, 30 plus years later, it's still a passion for me. Do you have to think on that moment the way that Emerson has to recall what he saw in that casket or it's just there? It's just there. Also, I grew up in a house where there was a lot of violence and trauma and loss, addiction, a lot of bad things.

I never had that sense of security. The safety was never there. It was never there. It was never there. And then it just got- Well, that's the law of compensation, right? Exactly. Is that from the darkness came a kind of freedom

or courage and yeah. Absolutely, I mean, I was set up to be a seeker. I couldn't have asked for a better childhood to turn me into a seeker. But no, I've never lost that sense of the tenuousness of being and the danger of being alive. And this is a high risk experience. And it's foolish to think otherwise.

It's arrogant. It's arrogant, but I could never do that even if I wanted to. I just, I have an intense sense of an existential sense that's always been with me. I can remember as a kid, I found a bird, a dead bird in the trash can when I was six or seven years old and I remember thinking, is that the bird?

Or is the thing that flew away, is that the bird? What's the birdness of it? So I was asking those kinds of questions from a really young age. I'm glad you brought up Emerson's essay, The Law of Compensation, because to me, that's the most stoic of all of his writings. This idea that, you know, there's a silver lining to everything

and there's also a thorn on every rose, right? And for the stoics, it's this idea, you know, the obstacle is the way, what you are challenged with is an opportunity to do things that you couldn't ordinarily do, that what fate deals you, whether you become a slave like Epictetus or an emperor like Marcus Aurelius,

that there's good things in that and bad things about that. And that you get to decide which of those you're gonna focus on. Your actions determine what it's ultimately gonna mean to you. That's where you get the compensation, right? You make the compensation and how you respond to it, what you turn it into, what you learn from it. Right, so it's a cooperation.

You're cooperating with what life gives you, but you're doing it with as much wisdom and insight and mindfulness as possible. So that you don't fall into why me, you don't fall into missing the opportunities. He talks about life as a laboratory and that if we miss those opportunities to grow from our misfortunes,

then we're missing probably the greatest gifts that we're being given. Right, the law of compensation is not in Emerson's case, you lose the love of your life and you're gonna find another one or a better one, right? It's not the law of attraction. Yeah, the law of compensation is if you choose not to give up to be broken by this experience, if you take it

where it leads you, it could open up a whole other path for your life, which as Emerson becomes the writer and thinker and philosopher as a result of wrestling with that horrible, seemingly unfair, unexpected fate. Do you know what I mean? That's the, you get the compensation for yourself in the choices and the actions that you take when you accept and embrace what feels like the worst thing

that could have ever possibly happened to you. Exactly, it's about not being fooled by appearances and seeing that everything has another face to it. In Buddhism, they talk about there being a secret face. The Buddha has the face that you see and then there's a secret face. And that's the same thing with misfortune. It opens all kinds of doors

as long as you don't fall into the rut of why me? My life is over. Things didn't go the way I wanted them to go. We get so attached to our story of things that we lose the sense of what's actually true. When being philosophical in the more colloquial sense of like, I'm gonna see how this plays out. I'm not gonna, I'm gonna withhold judgment.

I'm gonna see where this goes, right? The problem is the thing happens and we go, my life is over, things will never be the same, I've been ruined. And it's going, hey, you know, what happened to all those times I thought that in the past? Where am I now? You know, I look almost fondly back on that, or I thought that in the past? Where am I now? Exactly.

You know, I look almost fondly back on that or I have perspective or the volume on it's been turned down or the sharpness of it has been dulled. And so that I think that's what you see as you go, if life continues on, if you get more time, it's not that it heals all wounds, but it changes our perception of that thing because it's evened out by other things.

We've had other subsequent experiences and we grow wise that way. If you let it change. But a lot of us don't let it change. Then we fall into the narrative fallacy. This idea that my story of things is the way things actually are. And if my life doesn't hone to that story,

then I'm lost, failure. There's no reason to go on. I can't, I've lost my value. A lot of people feel when their lives change circumstantially, they've lost their value fundamentally instead of realizing your value in fact can increase if you use it to wake up, if you use it to get wiser or kinder

or more generous, more curious. And that's an important thing. Emerson talks a lot about curiosity. Staying curious, staying interested. And that's what journaling does. One of the great things that journaling does, it forces you to pay attention. You have to be present to write.

When you go back and look at those journals years later, you have a different perspective of your perspective at the time, you know what I mean? And it's this revisiting and coming back to it that's so powerful too. Although reading your own journals is one of the hardest, most unpleasant things you could do. Well, Mark, thank you very much.

I thought the book was awesome. And any excuse to get people into Emerson is an important one. Thank you. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple

podcasts. You know, if I would have applied myself, I could have gone to the NBA. You think so? Yeah, I think so. But it's just like it's been done. You know, I didn't want to, I was like, I don't want to be a follower. Hi, I'm Jason Concepcion. And I'm Shea Serrano.

And we are back. We have a new podcast from Wondery. It's called Six Trophies. And this is the best. Each week, Shea Serrano and I are combing through all the NBA storylines, finding the best, most interesting, most compelling stories, and then handing out six pop culture themed trophies for six basketball related activities. Trophies like the Dominic Toretto I Live My Life a Quarter Mile at a Time trophy,

which is given to someone who made a short-term decision with no regard for future consequence. Or the Christopher Nolan Tenet trophy, which is given to someone who did a short-term decision with no regard for future consequence. Or the Christopher Nolan Tenet Trophy, which is given to someone who did something that we didn't understand. Catalina wine mixer trophy. Ooh, the Lauryn Hill you might win some, but you just lost one trophy. And what's more, the NBA playoffs are here, so you want to make six trophies your go-to companion podcast through all the craziness. Follow six trophies on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts, listen ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus.